Falling for the Princess

by Sandra Hyatt

  His hand closed around hers and the small box within it. “Put it back. I’m not taking it from you.”

  As Rebecca slipped the ring back into her bag, the man seated on her right leaned in to speak. Logan got in first. “Excuse us, please. We’re about to dance.”

  He led her to the dance floor, pulled her in close to him with the hand that curved about her waist.

  Dancing with him was effortless. He moved with such assured grace, his body in tune with hers. As she should have known he would be. As she’d never get to experience again. She gave herself a few stolen seconds, stored away the sensation. She could lean her head on his shoulder now, all too easily. Now when she wouldn’t let herself. The seconds were exquisite torture.

  “What’s going on?” his low voice whispered in her ear.

  She swallowed. She had to do this. She’d known that what they had would end. But not like this. Not by her own hand. And not so soon. She pulled back from him a little and smiled brightly, aware of the brittleness of her expression. “Nothing’s going on. I realized I don’t want to go through with this.” She spoke dismissively. “That’s all.”

  “This?”

  “The charade of an engagement.”

  He leaned back enough to watch her face. “What’s wrong?”

  The concern in his gaze, a concern that was all for her, nearly undid her. He wasn’t buying her indifference. And she knew he’d try to find a way to push and probe until he uncovered the truth of what was happening. If he knew she was doing this for him he wouldn’t let her. That was how he was. He’d insist on honoring his side of the bargain. A bargain that felt more hollow than ever.

  So she said the only thing she knew would make him back off. “I had time to think after we got back from the lake and I’ve realized there might be other men I’d like to date. Men from my own social milieu.” She lifted her fingers from his shoulder and waved to an imaginary friend across the room. She swallowed again and lifted one suddenly cold shoulder in a shrug. “My father’s list might not have been so terrible.”

  “That polo player?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  Rebecca tried for a playful smile, as though she wasn’t breaking her own heart, shattering her own dreams. “Amongst others. He wanted to take me to the opera next weekend. I thought that might be nice. And I know you don’t like the opera.”

  “Nice?” Logan stopped dead, his jaw hard, a muscle working high up, near his ear. He studied her as though he’d never seen her before in his life. The music still played, dancers swirled around them. For a moment she thought he might walk away, leave her standing alone on the dance floor.

  But his grip on her hand, and his hold at her waist, tightened. His gaze narrowed and darkened. “Will you come outside with me, somewhere where we can talk properly, and tell me what’s really going on?”

  “I can’t leave the dinner,” she said blithely, looking up at him. “It’s just not done. And really, there’s nothing I can add.” She had to lock her knees to keep her legs from trembling.

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s for the best. No one was seriously going to believe we were a couple. I told my father not to announce our engagement because it was over between us. But it’s been…fun. Thank you.” She didn’t know how she stood for so long smiling through his scrutiny. People moved around them, glancing curiously at them. Finally he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles in the gentlest of kisses. A kiss that nearly undid her. Then he led her from the dance floor, dropped her hand and kept walking.

  Rebecca didn’t call out to him to ask—beg—him to come back, and she didn’t run after him. Nor did she give in to the urge to flee and hide where she could lick her wounds, give in to the sobs that tried to force their way from her chest. She didn’t do any of the things she wanted to do. She watched his back as he cut a swath through the milling guests, watched the top of his dark head until he was gone from her sight and then she returned to her seat and made polite conversation with the guests at the dinner. It was what she was trained to do.

  Never had she needed her training more.

  Two mornings later, Logan strode into the reception area of leBlanc Industries. This opportunity, he reminded himself as he looked around at the old world elegance, was all he’d wanted in establishing himself in this country. It was his entrée into the rest of Europe. The continuation of the expansion that had fueled his dreams for almost as long as he could remember.

  Rebecca, who had left a gash in his heart, had been a means to that end. But not the only means. She’d been window dressing. He could do it without her.

  He still didn’t understand how he’d misjudged her and everything between them so badly. Still couldn’t make sense of her sudden U-turn. Or his reaction to it. The loss of sleep that had nothing to do with a loss of business opportunities, or the bleakness of a day that held no promise of seeing her, hearing her voice, touching her.

  He unclenched the hands at his side. He didn’t need her. He’d bought in to or taken over numerous businesses in the past, all without her at his side. This would be no different. He looked to his future, a future with no place in it for a princess.

  A personal assistant arrived to lead him to the board-room. A dozen formally suited board members sat around the massive mahogany table, their smiles and body language receptive.

  An hour later he strode out and boarded a plane for Chicago.

  They’d offered him everything he wanted.

  Fourteen

  Rebecca fingered the thin gold chain around her neck as she skirted the crowded dance floor. All she really wanted was to escape the ball being held in her honor. The ball that had been intended to help her choose a suitor.

  Tonight only Adam was fulfilling their father’s expectations, dutifully dancing beneath the glittering chandeliers with almost every hopeful female attending, though none more than once.

  Rebecca had danced with no one.

  Because she had driven away the only man she wanted.

  She had set herself the challenge of staying until midnight, but the minutes and hours had dragged. Soon though she would be able to leave. Alone. She had just one thing to do first.

  Eduardo had been avoiding her since their last meeting.

  The day Logan had walked out of her life and gone back to Chicago.

  Eduardo’s practiced smile dimmed and grew wary as she approached and unclenched her jaw enough to ask him to dance.

  This was the only way to guarantee he would talk to her, to guarantee that she would keep a rein on her emotions and guarantee a specific end point to their conversation.

  Their plan—hers and Logan’s—had worked even when she’d wanted it not to. Despite her efforts to conceal her despair, her father had sensed its depths and offered to cancel the ball. He said he’d seen how upset she was over the end of her relationship with Logan. But she had insisted the ball go on. Because upset didn’t even begin to describe her desolation.

  That she’d done the right thing was little consolation.

  When Logan had left she’d needed to rant and rave and so in the privacy of her bedroom those first nights she’d given vent to her heartbreak and grief and it had made her laugh and then cry harder to think that Logan would be proud of her for yielding to her emotions, for allowing her self to be overcome by them. As if she’d had a choice.

  She walked to the dance floor with a tellingly silent Eduardo.

  It was duty that had kept her going. She’d thrown herself back into work even as she’d felt like a hologram of herself. She had filled every hour of every day in a fruitless attempt to ensure she had no time to think about Logan, to dwell on him, to compare the emptiness of her life now to its fullness while he’d been in it. But no matter how busy she kept herself, thoughts of Logan underscored or overlaid every single thing she did. There was always time to think about him.

  She dwelled.

  Compounding her misery over the loss of him was the hurt of know
ing how badly he must be thinking of her. His good opinion mattered more than anyone else’s in the world. And she had lost it. He believed she’d coldly reneged on their agreement and their relationship because she wanted to see other men.

  As if any other man could compare.

  She dwelled while she’d sat on boards, and attended openings. While she drove to kindergartens and hospitals. She dwelled when she fell into bed at night and couldn’t sleep. She imagined him back in Chicago. Wondered what he was doing. Whether he thought of her.

  And the pain and heartache had all been for nothing.

  For which she blamed the man with whom she now danced, resenting every second of the touch of his hand to hers.

  There was a wretched part of her that knew she should probably thank Eduardo. He had merely precipitated the inevitable and preordained conclusion. If her time with Logan had gone on longer, the trauma of the end, as overwhelming as it was, would have been even more devastating.

  When she thought she had mastery over her voice and the storm of anger and grief within her, she spoke. “You broke our bargain.” Her voice was gratifyingly steady. “I never thought you’d stoop so low.” She wasn’t yet ready to thank him. “You couldn’t seriously think I would ever go out with you again, no matter how well that would reflect on you or how much political capital your stepfather would gain from the association.”

  Eduardo frowned and stiffened. “I kept our bargain.”

  Rebecca gave an unprincesslike snort of derision. “Our bargain was that Logan got the approval he needed if we weren’t together.”

  “He had the board’s approval. He turned it down.”

  “He turned it down? I don’t believe you. It was everything he wanted.”

  “He turned it down flat and walked out of the meeting. And don’t look at me like that. It was nothing to do with me. The board members were as perplexed as you.”

  “But…”

  Eduardo moved and spoke stiffly. “Whatever happened, and for whatever reason, I still say no good—for you or the country—could have come from a relationship between you and Logan Buchanan. He was wrong for you. Utterly wrong. In time you’ll see that.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then you’re not the woman I thought you were.”

  She disengaged her hand from his and stepped away. “I’ve never been the woman you thought I was.” The only man who’d ever seen the woman she really was had gone. She turned and walked back to her seat.

  Midnight was only minutes away. Then she could leave and seek the sanctuary of her quiet, dark, Logan-less room.

  She tried her best to be attentive to her table companions, to play her part.

  A couple of times she caught Adam, in the arms of one or another beautiful woman, frowning at her. He would have to do his royal duty for the both of them. It didn’t look as though it was too much of a hardship for him.

  Finally, finally she heard the slow distant chime of the tower clock. As politely as she could—hiding her desire to flee—she excused herself.

  She made it outside, to the top of the broad sweeping stairs, and closed her eyes on the welling tears. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath just as the twelfth chime of midnight sounded on the air. Her fingers sought the chain about her neck. And despite knowing better, despite the futility, she couldn’t help but wish that she could wind back the clock and do everything differently. That she could have one more chance with Logan.

  She’d never told him she loved him. The love that in a different lifetime would have been a joy was now her burden.

  Footsteps approached. She waited for them to pass. She needed just a moment before she faced her life again…

  “You’re going about this all wrong.” A deep, low voice sounded by her ear. And even though she tried to tamp down the vicious flare of hope, because Logan had gone back to his life in Chicago, she whirled to face the speaker. Daring to hope.

  And her heart soared.

  Logan searched her face, just as she drank in the angry, beautiful sight of him, as though it had been an eternity, not a handful of days since she’d last seen him. She catalogued and savored his features, the hard line of his jaw, the tense set to his shoulders and the smoldering depths of his eyes. And the roughness to his breath, as though he’d just sprinted the dozens of stairs. His bow tie dangled undone about his neck. His presence, so longed for, felt almost like an apparition, like the unexpected granting of her deepest wish. So surreal that she feared at any moment he might vanish.

  She longed to reach for him, to touch his face, to throw her arms around him. But the foreboding in his gaze held her still. “I thought you were in Chicago.”

  “I was. I had commitments there.”

  “But you’ve come back?”

  “Because I have commitments here, too.” He lifted his hands to her face and she saw in his eyes, and in the dark shadows beneath them, something of her own torment. His gaze dipped to the chain around her neck.

  “If you want to get rid of me,” he said, “the very last thing you should tell me is that I’m second choice. It just makes me determined to win.”

  No words came as he watched her, waited for her response. “That was what you were trying to do, wasn’t it? To get rid of me?”

  And despite the fact that the denial and explanation stayed trapped in her throat, he lowered his hands and looped his arms around her waist to pull her close. As though he craved the connection of touch as desperately as she did.

  She ought to pull back.

  Instead she clung. She took pleasure in his nearness and his touch, in his scent and his warmth. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to inhale the very essence of him.

  In spite of the tension vibrating from him she dared to hope.

  He had come back.

  To the music that drifted from within the great hall, he began swaying with her. He edged them away from the wide doors, away from the guests coming and leaving.

  The voice of doubt and self-preservation wouldn’t give up. She couldn’t jump to conclusions just because this was what she ached for. He’d come back, but why and for how long? “You didn’t buy the subsidiary.”

  “No.” He held her tighter.

  “But it was everything you wanted. Everything you’d worked toward.”

  He stopped moving. “It wasn’t everything I wanted. I don’t take well to being manipulated. And I don’t need your charity.”

  She pulled back at the accusation in his tone. He loosened his hold only enough that she could see his face. “Manipulated? Charity?”

  “I won board approval only after I told them our relation ship had ended. They were prepared to award it because you and I were no longer an item. And the man behind it all, the one looking the smuggest, was your old friend’s new stepfather.”

  Rebecca gasped. “You didn’t take it because of pride? You threw away everything you’d worked toward because you were miffed?”

  “No.”

  “Then, why?” The words hiccupped in her throat, caught behind a sob. So much pain and for what?

  “Because I needed to prove something.”

  “Point scoring? With Eduardo and his stepfather?”

  “No. With you.”

  “I don’t understand.” Her anger was beginning to rival the one she sensed in him.

  “Answer this. Why did you send me away?”

  “I wanted to give you what you wanted. Eduardo guaranteed you would win the bid, but only if we were no longer together. I did you a favor.”

  “And you didn’t trust me enough to tell me what your so-called friend had said, let me find a way around it?”

  “I knew you’d think you had to honor your side of the bargain and give me the public engagement we’d agreed on. But it would cost you what you wanted. You could at least appreciate the sacrifice.”

  He stilled. “So it was a sacrifice? Ending what we had?”

  He lifted both hands to her jaw, tilting her head up, for
cing her to meet his gaze.

  “Yes. But it was the right thing to do. And I’d do the same again. We were ending anyway.”

  “Were we?”

  “That’s what we’d agreed.” That simple agreement seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “Yes. It was,” he said gently. “But when the end came, it turned out to be not at all what I expected. Or wanted.”

  “That’s why you didn’t buy into leBlanc? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Something softened in his gaze. He lowered his hands to loop them behind her back again and began moving slowly with her, not waltzing, just swaying. Together. “Nothing about us makes sense on the surface. But here,” he brushed his fingers over his heart, shifted them to where hers pounded with hope, “here it makes sense.” Then he scooped a finger beneath the chain that hung around her neck, dipping below the neckline of her dress. Lifting the chain, he pulled up its secret treasure. The ring that hung hidden against her chest. She couldn’t wear it on her finger but she had wanted it close, wanted to wear it somehow.

  “You’re wearing my ring.”

  There was no response she could give that wouldn’t incriminate her. She’d tried but hadn’t been able to give up the ring, had needed to keep it close. So she opted for full-on incrimination and whispered, “Always.”

  “The reason I didn’t take the opportunity you so nobly offered was because I needed you to know that when I came to you to tell you I love you and ask you to marry me, that I was doing it for you alone. You are everything I want.”

  Logan reached behind her neck and undid the clasp of her chain then removed the necklace and let the ring slide into his upturned palm. He picked up her hand and, holding her gaze, his eyes seeking permission, he waited for her nod before sliding the ring onto her finger.

  “I want you, Rebecca Marconi. I want you in every possible sense of the word. Forever. I love you and I want you to share my life and I want to share yours. Whatever I have to do to make that happen, whatever sacrifices and compromises are necessary will be worth it. Because nothing is as important to me as being with you.” He paused for breath. “Will you marry me?”